ENTRAPMENT OF PERMANENTLY EMPLOYED EMPLOYEES:
PRECARIOUS WORK BEHAVIOR, ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE AND PERCEIVED ORGANISATIONAL SUPPORT
Noormala Amir Ishak
Arshad Ayub Graduate Business School, Universiti Teknologi MARA;
noormala317@salam.uitm.edu.my Norashikin Hussein
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA; shikin6320@salam.uitm.edu.my Ibiwani Alisa Hussain
Faculty of Business and Management, Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation;
dr.ibiwani@apu.edu.my Siti Fazilah Hamid
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, ctfazilah_4d@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
Mounting research evidence suggests that permanently employed employees are increasingly involved in precarious work behavior. This new trend of employment has provoked researchers to center their attention to the reasons leading to this precarity. With regard to this, we hypothesized that organizational justice and perceived organizational support are negatively related to precarious work behavior. Using online survey data on employees who are permanently employed but concurrently doing side business, a cross sectional sample of 179 was gathered. The results found that organizational justice and perceived organizational support are negatively related to precarious work behavior with organizational justice having the greater influence. Implications for future research and practical applications are discussed.
Keywords: Precarious work behavior, Organizational justice, Perceived organizational support
Introduction
Precarious work has emerged as a serious challenge and a major concern in the contemporary world.
Global scale transitions have shaped the increasing precariousness of work. The word precarious goes by many names that are often interchangeable, including precarity, informalisation and casualisation (Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013).
According to the latest ILO (International Labor Organisation) definition, precarious work behavior is understood to include remunerative work, both self-employment and wage employment, not recognized, regulated or protected by existing legal or regulatory frameworks as well as non- remunerative work undertaken in an income-producing enterprise (Arnold and Aung, 2011).
The standard employment relationship seems to be eroding (Cappelli, 1999) whereby workers who work full-time are no longer doing this. Many are involved in doing other ‘businesses’ outside from their job.
In our view, we account two unique factors which are organisational justice and perceived organisational support that may help to explain these employees’ variations on the relationship with
precarious work behavior.
As such, the study has two specific objectives:
Objective 1:
To investigate the influence of organisational justice on precarious work behavior.
Objective 2:
To investigate influence of perceived organisational support on precarious work behavior.
The researchers envisage that this study will help organisations to understand the organisational variables that lead employees to indulge in precarious work behavior. We hope that knowledge from the study will provide a basis for effective managerial intervention to develop employees who will engage fully in their full time employment and be efficient and effective, as such discouraging precarious work behavior amongst employees.
Growth of Precarious Work Behavior
Production and work are central to human endeavor, and it is thus vital to understand how work, production, and security are becoming increasingly precarious. In the literature on work and employment, there has long been a distinction between standard (or formal) and nonstandard (or informal) work. By “precarious work” we refer to the uncertainty, instability, and insecurity of work in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements (Vosko, 2010). Work process has changed dramatically over the years with the increased of knowledge and technological innovation. The cost of living has increased year by year as such; most employees feel the pressure to increase their income source.
Antecedents of Precarious Work Behavior Organisational Justice
The study of justice perceptions is an important area of research in organizational behavior because of its relationship to relevant individual and organizational outcomes (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001). When workers feel they are treated unfairly, absenteeism, turnover, stress, and retaliatory intentions tend to increase (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter and Ng, 2001; Nirmala and Akhilesh, 2006). Employees are increasingly paying attention to justice within their organization (Ambrose and Schminke, 1998) and as a result, employees’ perceptions of organizational justice can affect organizational commitment, job satisfaction, withdrawal behavior, organisational citizenship behavior, entrepreneurship, organizational trust of employees and even involving in precarious work behavior (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001; Zhang, LePine, Buckman and Wei, 2014).
Perceived Organisational Support (POS)
POS refers to employees in an organization forming global beliefs concerning the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchinson and Sowa, 1986). That is to say, POS is thought to represent employees’ beliefs that the organization is willing to reward them for the effort made on its behalf (Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002).
Hypothesis Development
Organisational justice and POS have not been conceptually or empirically linked with precarious work behavior; we however believe there is reason to expect these two factors to have influence on precarious work behavior. The following hypotheses are thus envisaged:
Hypothesis 1: Organisational justice is negatively related to precarious work behavior.
Hypothesis 2: Perceived organisational support is negatively related to precarious work behavior.
Expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964) holds that people are motivated to behave in ways that produce desired outcomes. That is, people choose to behave from amongst alternative courses of action based on their expectations of what they are to gain from each action (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2004;
Ivancevich, Konopaske and Matteson, 2005). According to Expectancy Theory, the tendency to act in a certain way depends on the strength of expectancy that a given consequence (or outcome) will follow the act and on the attractiveness of that consequence (or outcome) to the actors (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2004). The expectations of people that certain levels of effort will produce their intended goals will affect their motivation. This motivation takes the form of them being involved in work outside their main job responsibilities from their permanent job; as in precarious work behavior.
From the review, it is thus hypothesized that organizational justice and POS will be negatively related to precarious work behavior. When employees feel that they have not been fairly treated or that they are not receiving much support from their superiors, these employees will tend to find an alternative towards making themselves feel more secured and earn additional income as well as having more challenges in their lives by getting involved in precarious work. The research framework (Fig.
1) is shown:
Fig. 1: Research framework
Methodology
The unit of analysis comprised of permanent employed employees who were doing precarious work beyond their permanent job. In this study, precarious work behavior refers to specifically employees doing online business. They were those who do sales on cosmetics, house wares, toys, IT accessories, etc. The study relied on self-reported online survey and asked respondents a range of questions related to organizational justice, POS and precarious work behavior. Questionnaires were prepared in English.
Those who completed the questionnaires were also asked to provide names of friends whom they know who are also involved in online businesses and might be interested and willing to complete the questionnaire.
Through this snowballed method, 192 respondents were received. The respondents received incentives for successfully completed questionnaires. As such this opted sampling technique is a non- probability sampling as we do not have a sampling frame. According to Hair, William, Black, Babin and Anderson (2010), the ratio sample size of ten respondents for one measurement item is acceptable as minimum sample size for PLS-SEM. Hence considering the total of 11 measurement items to be used, samples received from 179 respondents were acceptable.
We excluded studies that were based on non-directional measures of organizational justice and perceived organizational support. This study employed measures which were used in prior studies. All factors were each measured unidimensionally and the items were combined into overall composite measures. This is important in that it permits analyses that can more clearly reveal differential relationships between both organizational justice and perceived organizational support on precarious work behavior.
We assessed all measures with Likert-type responses ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. We measured precarious work behavior using items from Vives et al. (2010).
Organisational justice was measured using a six-item created by Ambrose and Schminke (2009).
Perceived organizational support was measured with the eleven-item Survey of Perceived Organisational Support (Eisenberger, Fasolo, and Davis La-Mastro, 1990).
A pilot study was conducted to determine the clarity and reliability of the questionnaire and to test the internal reliability of the measures. Pilot study was done to collect data from the ultimate subjects of the research to serve as a guide for a larger study. Van Belle (2011) recommended the use of minimum 12 cases for pilot survey as sufficient. As such 14 cases were approached for the pilot. SPSS version 23.0 was employed to check the reliability of all measures. The internal reliability of the measures ranged between 0.71 to 0.90.
Results and Discussion
Data were collected at one point of time using a web-based survey. A total of 250 online surveys through emails were sent and 192 respondents completed the survey, however 13 had to be excluded as the respondents did not fulfill the condition of having a permanent job. A total of 179 respondents were deemed usable indicating a response rate of 72 percent. Of these respondents, 29 per cent were males and 71 per cent were females. Majority of them were from the age of between 26 years old to 45 years old (84%). About 58 per cent respondents had degree qualifications, 14 percent Diploma and 19 percent had Master’s degree. All of them were permanently employed.
The study relied on PLS-SEM to test measurement and structural model by using the SmartPLS 2.0 software (Chin and Marcoulides, 1998). The data was first screened to identify missing data, to identify outliers and influential points, to assess normality and to check for common method variance.
Organisational Justice
Perceived Organisational
Support
Precarious Work Behavior
The measurement model was assessed first prior to the structural model assessment. Each construct in the model was inspected for its validity and reliability. In accordance with PLS-SEM, construct validity was assessed to ensure the measurements were valid. To do this we checked convergent and discriminant validity which are sub-categories of construct validity. In convergent validity, the factor loadings and the average variance extracted (AVE) were checked (Chin and Marcoulides, 1998).
Convergent validity is achieved when the factor loadings are above 0.708 and the AVE is above 0.502 (Chin and Marcoulides, 1998; Ringle, Wende and Will, 2005).
As for discriminant validity, a construct should be clearly distinct from other constructs which have been theoretically shown to be different. Construct reliability and AVE of the reflective constructs are shown in Table 1. Results from the outer loadings showed no indicators found to be below 0.40. As such no items were removed.
Inspection on AVE showed all constructs were above 0.50. The constructs were also checked on discriminant validity, the square root of the AVE of each construct was compared with the correlations between that construct and all other constructs (Ringle et al., 2005). To achieve discriminant validity, the HTMT value should not be greater than the HTMT.85 value of 0.852. All values (precarious work behavior 0.36, CI.85 (0.226; 0.480); organizational justice 0.28, CI.85 (0.152;0.425);
POS 0.38 CI.85 (0.254; 0.506) passed HTMT.85 measures indicating that each construct in the model measures a unique subject and captures phenomena not presented by other constructs in the model.
After running the PLS algorithm in SmartPLS to assess the measurement model, the variable scores were used to compute the mean scores and the standard deviation scores. The variables were measured on a 5-point scale; the mean scores were reported for precarious work behavior (M=2.74, SD=0.64), organizational justice (M=3.49, SD=0.82) and perceived organizational support (M=3.45, SD=0.88).
Multicollinearity refers to the extent to which a variable can be explained by the other variables in the analysis (Ringle et al., 2005). It is difficult to ascertain the effect of multicollinearity of any single variable; however variance inflation factors (VIF) were used to examine this. It was found that the VIF values were below the standard criteria (precarious work behavior = 1.064; organizational justice = 1.004 and POS = 1.059) indicating no multicollinearity issue.
The next analysis done was to assess the structural model. Structural model was assessed to test the relationships between organizational justice, perceived organizational support and precarious work behavior. The coefficient of determination (R2 values) and path coefficients (beta values) were parameters to determine how well the data supported the hypothesized relationships. A bootstrapping process with 500 iterations was performed to generate t-values and standard errors to confirm the statistical significance. R2 measures the predictive accuracy of the model and represents the percentage of variance in the dependent variable as explained by the independent variables in the model (Fig. 1).
From what is seen in Fig. 1, both organizational justice and perceived organizational support explain about 26% of the variance in precarious work behavior (R2 = 0.26). The path coefficients (B) indicate the degree of change in the dependent variable for each independent variable. As shown in Table 2 and Fig. 2, the path coefficient for organisational justice and precarious work behavior was the only significance shown, thus supporting H1. Perceived organizational support was not statistically significant with precarious work behavior, therefore H2 is not supported.
Table 1: Factor Loadings, CR and AVE
Constru cts
Items Outer
Loadings CR AVE
PWB PWBa 0.705 0.825 0.542
PWBb 0.758
PWBc 0.814
PWBd 0.658
Justic
e justa 0.901 0.890 0.773
justb 0.912
justc 0.899
Note: CR = Composite Reliability; AVE = average variance extracted
!
Fig. 2: Measurement Model Framework
Table 2: Results of Hypothesis Test
B = -0.488, t = 5.384
B = -0.034, t = 0.377
Fig. 2: The Structural Model
justd 0.511
POS POSa 0.867 0.911 0.72
POSb 0.889
POSc 0.881
Hypotheses Path B t Decision
H1 Justice →PWB -0.488 5.384 Supported
H2 POS→PWB -0.034 0.377 Not
Supported
Organizational Justice
Perceived Organisational
Support
Precarious Work Behaviour R2 = 0.26 H1
H2
The predictive relevance (Q2) and effect size (f2) are also reported in Table 3. The guidelines of Cohen- Charash and Spector (2001) were used to assess the f2, whereby 0.02, 0.15 and 0.35, indicate small, medium and large effects respectively. The f2 values show that organisational justice has a medium effect in producing R2 for precarious work behavior and perceived organizational support shows small effect in producing R2 for precarious work behavior.
In addition, the predictive relevance of the model is examined using the blindfolding procedure. If Q2 value is larger than 0, the model has predictive relevance for precarious work behavior. The Q2 value for precarious work behavior is 0.122 which is larger than 0 indicating that the model has sufficient predictive relevance.
Table 3: R2, f2 and Q2
Findings to note are the need to further work on promoting justice at the workplace. Justice can be either firstly be through the pay, bonuses, increments, recognition that employers give to employees, – referred to as distributive justice; secondly justice in relationships with superiors and employees – referred to as interactional justice and thirdly, justice in ensuring work is done in a fair manner – referred to as procedural justice.
Substantial new investments in employees also can be provided in the form of education and trainings. Employers can encourage employees to update and maintain their skills at work. In a precarious world, education is more essential than ever, as employees must constantly learn new skills.
Also family supportive policies leading to better parental leave and child care options can also offer relief from precarity and insecurity.
Overall, the study findings point to the need for organizations to take both an anticipatory and retrospective approach to precarious work behavior of employees. Some of these strategies include:
revising systems and procedures to eliminate the potential for increase precarious work behavior of employees who are permanently employed; implementing HR policies aimed at promoting fairness, for example standardized salary scales and development programs; providing a controlled, accessible, responsive, non-retributive means for employees to access help and support to tackle unforeseen or one-off instances of injustice. Also the management should also provide continuous organizational support so as this would be seen as a strategy of getting employees to be engaged with the organization and as such will get employees to give their full concentration towards their job.
Limitations
Two limitations of the study should be acknowledged. Firstly, the fact that this study was conducted based on cross sectional designs precludes the ability to make causal assertions regarding the nature of the relationships involved. Therefore, we recommend that future study takes an approach of longitudinal research design. Moreover, future study may look at third-party measures of precarious work behavior to further investigate its relationship with other organisational factors. Secondly, although the results showed support for the empirical distinctiveness of the studied variables, the self- reported data on organisational justice, perceived organisational support and precarious work behavior were measured by self-rating method; this may lead the potential to spuriously inflate the observed relationships thus introducing common method variance as an alternative explanation for the findings.
Conclusion
A holistic, interdisciplinary social science approach to studying work, which elaborates on the variability in employees’ motivation towards work, has the potential to address many of the significant concerns facing employers in the coming years. By highlighting what we know and what areas are most in need of further research, this study can serve as a vehicle for stimulating further investigation into human resource practices that are effective in helping employers to understand their employees.
Path R2 Q2 f2
Organisational Justice -0.488 0.189
Perceived Organisational
Support
-0.034 0.001
PWB 0.122
The results can encourage employers and other organizational representatives to increase their perceptions of organisational justice and organisational support as to reduce the motivation of their employees to involve them in precarious work behavior. Generating a countermovement to alleviate the consequences of precarious work and to provide workers with greater security represents an important challenge for the future.
Acknowledgment: Several organisations have contributed towards the success of the research. First, the authors would like to thank The Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) Malaysia for awarding the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS), project number 600-RMI/FRGS 5/3 (0023/2016). Next, to Arshad Ayub Graduate Business School and Research Management Institute (RMI) of Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia for the assistance and support.
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